This morning, I clicked on a story about tonight’s National Book Awards ceremony in New York. Buried in the story were the sales figures of the five books nominated for the year’s Best Fiction book award. And I was shocked. All five nominees received a fair amount of public praise, and all are published by reputable presses, yet of the bunch, only one has sold more than 27,000 copies. Indeed, one of my favorites, Ben Fountain’s BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK, has sold the fewest—only 11,000 copies. Here are the figures: Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her 48,000 Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King 27,000 Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds 18,000 Louise Erdrich, The Round House 15,000 Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk 11,000 Seeing figures like this can be depressing. Of course, art should never be judged solely on measures of sales, but it just made me feel out-of-step with the society in which I live. Years ago, Philip Roth posited that, at most, there were 120,000 readers of serious fiction in this country. Today, not even Roth classifies himself as a serious fiction reader, having declared that he will no longer read fiction. Last night, I took Sebastian (11) and Ellie (7) to a screening of THE CITY DARK, a documentary that explores the consequences of light pollution, which, especially in urban areas, diminishes our ability to look up at the sky at night at see the cosmos. (You can see the movie’s trailer here.) The visually-stunning documentary talked about the health consequences (both to humans, and others inhabiting our planet), but one question more than any other stayed in my mind afterwards. To wit, Nearly every civilization before ours could look up at the night sky and feel dwarfed by the sheer majesty of stars in the firmament. How will it affect us, philosophically, to no longer experience that sense of being dwarfed by the cosmos? Years ago, I read some column or another that suggested that we no longer give books as gifts with the expectation that the recipient will actually read them. To be fair, the book in question was Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Instead, the columnist suggested that when we give a nice leather-bound volume to Aunt Sally or Uncle Joe, it is given as a complement, suggesting that we’d like to think Sally or Joe is capable of reading the book. But what happens after we cease the charade of thinking ourselves as a race of people actually capable of reading a great novel? I’ve been working a lot on novel revisions, which is one of the reasons I haven’t blogged much lately. One of the questions I’ve inserted into the particular novel is what are the consequences of the eclipse of the book. Perhaps it’s a question I should insert more forcefully into the work, but what does it mean when one no longer looks at oneself as being capable of reading, say, a 250-page novel? The book might very well have been the most important “discovery” invented by man, enabling people to hold within their hands a vast compendium of human thought. But what good is it as we ebb closer to our post-literate age?

“I decided that I was done with fiction. I do not want to read, to write more,” he said. “I have dedicated my life to the novel: I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life.”

I'm actually kinda speechless just thinking about this. All I can say is,

[Stephen picks up a pillow from the floor and tosses it in the general direction of the bed but, Stephen being Stephen, the pillow falls short of its target.]

Nick: Stephen, make your bed!

Stephen: Okay, God.

[And he proceeds to toss his comforter back on the bed. And the pillow too. He shoots me a disgruntled look and then proceeds to shabbily arrange comforter and pillow in a marginally acceptable way.]

He'll be 13 in a few weeks. Cynicism unfortunately runs in the family.

Ugh.

The other day, my mother phoned me when I was in the middle of something. She tells me in a near breathless voice that sometime in the middle of that night, she awoke to the sound of something moving in her house. The door to her bedroom was open and she looked out into the hall, where she saw a fairly young woman dressed in blue jeans and a tee shirt, nicely dressed, actually. The woman blew her a kiss. My mother drifted back to sleep, confident that she had just seen her guardian angel.

She wanted to know if I thought her crazy.

What does one say in such situations?

If I were writing this as a scene in a story, it would be followed by her waking up the following morning to discover that her house had been ransacked. Jewelry, televisions and anything of apparent value would be missing. Painting and pictures would be flung from the walls, littering the floor. The refrigerator door would be open but, accept for maybe a carton of spoiled orange juice and a shriveled apple, there would be no food inside it.

Odds & Ends: I spent most of the last couple of months revising another novel, meaning that I’ve now been querying agents on two different novels. Last week, another agent emailed asking if I have a short story collection in me—the answer, of course, is yes. Which means that three different book-length manuscripts are now in the hands of different agents.

Which explains why I’d kinda like a guardian angel to shine some luck my way!

Odds & Ends II: According to Wikipedia, Philip Roth has a memoir coming out later this year called NOTES FOR MY BIOGRAPHER. This made me very happy. As long-time readers of this blog know, I’m something of a Philip Roth nut (see here and here). However, there is no such book. I emailed Andrew Wylie, Mr. Roth’s legendary agent, and asked how I might get a copy of the memoir for review purposes. Mr. Wylie (who, sadly, is not one of the agents looking at my manuscripts) emailed back to tell me that the Wikipedia mention was in error. Which is too bad, because a full-length Philip Roth memoir would be a must-read.

Odds & Ends III: A few weeks ago, I learned one of my flash fiction pieces won Packingtown Review’s 2011-12 Flash Fiction Contest. Which was a great surprise! I’ll post a link as soon as it’s available.

As you might have gathered from reading pastposts, I’m something of a Philip Roth fan. I’ve read a dozen or so of his novels but, given his long and productive career, that barely touches the surface. What I like about Roth is that he does not shirk from taking on “big” subjects. Yes, at times I cringe at his characters’ misogyny, but there’s such energy to his prose—which is strange, because his digression-filled narratives so often cut back and forth in time, a strategy that in less-gifted hands is momentum-killing.

James Wood, writing about 2007’s Exit Ghost, called Roth “the great stealth postmodernist of American letters,” which is fitting. We don’t often lump Roth in the post-modern camp because, on a sentence level, he does not consciously seek to dazzle. His first book, the National Book Award-winning story collection Goodbye Columbus, was published three years before Nabokov’s Pale Fire. He comes from that last generation before Barthelme and Pynchon.

As Wood says,

“Roth has been the great stealth postmodernist of American letters, able to have his cake and eat it without any evidence of crumbs. This is because he does not regard himself as a postmodernist. He is intensely interested in fabrication, in the performance of the self, in the reality that we make up in order to live; but his fiction examines this ‘without sacrificing the factuality of time and place to surreal fakery or magic-realist gimmickry,’ as [Roth’s character, Nathan] Zuckerman approvingly says of [another writer’s] work. Roth does not want to use his games to remind us, tediously and self-consciously, that [his characters] are just ‘invented characters.’

[Implicit in Wood’s assessment is idea that razzle-dazzle sentences and “magic-realist gimmickry” necessarily lead to the creation of characters that readers do not perceive as being “real.”]

While Roth’s sentences don’t call attention to themselves, I have long admired him for his paragraphs. Especially when detailing past incidents, he can crunch so much into his paragraphs. Multiple speakers. Multiple lines of dialogue. Multiple actions. Yet always there is enough of a connecting narrative thread to pull the reader along.

I was reminded of Roth’s paragraphs again when reading Portnoy’s Complaint last week for the first time. To be honest, the novel as a whole disappointed me, but some of the paragraphs floored me.

Here’s one in which the young Alexander Portnoy recalls his father arguing with his mother while leaving his house one morning to go to work:

“Talk?” he cries. “It’s the truth,” and in the very next instant is thomping angrily around the house hollering, “My hat, I’m late, where’s my hat? who saw my hat?” and my mother comes into the kitchen and gives me her patient, eternal all-knowing sphinx-look… and waits… and soon he is back in the hallway, apoplectic and moaning, practically in grief, “Where is my hat? Where is that hat!” until softly, from the depths of her omniscient soul, she answers him, “Dummy, it’s on your head.” Momentarily his eyes seem to empty of all signs of human experience and understanding; he stands there, a blank, a thing, a body full of [excrement] and no more. Then consciousness returns—yes, he will have to go out into the world after all, for his hat has been found, on his head of all places. “Oh, yeah,” he says, reaching up in wonderment—and then out of the house and into the [car], and [he] is gone until dark.”

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a new novel, which I hope to finish by sometime in September. In it, I’ve been trying to write Roth-like paragraphs incorporating the multiple speakers and multiple acts. This is something of a stretch for me, but it’s going well and I’m having a lot of fun writing it.

Falco Errata: Recently, I wrote about Ed Falco’s Burning Man collection. I neglected to mention that he’s also the man responsible for the forthcoming Godfather sequel. Here’s an interview he gave to The Roanoke Times last month about that project.

Blackwell Errata: Check out Gabriel Blackwell’s hypertext-y “Neverland,” now up at Uncanny Valley. It’s a really fun piece, so be prepared to spend some time there. Or, better yet, make multiple visits.

“[T]he American writer… has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”

Philip Roth wrote that assessment over 50 years ago, yet the same holds true today: truth is stranger than fiction.

“Writing American Fiction,” Roth’s essay from which these words were taken, began with a three-page recounting of a Chicago murder and its truly bizarre aftermath. Two girls go missing one winter after seeing an Elvis Presley movie. The case has the city on edge. When the warming weather melts the snowy cityscape, the girls’ bodies are found, naked, in a ditch. A ne’er-do-well drifter confesses to the killings after having shacked up with them for a few weeks. Or so he says. Nuns tell reporters that the victims “were not exceptional girls… they had no hobbies.” Out on bail, the confessed killer holds a press conference to profess innocence. He claims police brutality. The press takes a shine to him. Newspapers run contests, inviting readers to speculate about exactly how the girls were murdered. Still out on bail, the ne’er-do-well drifter develops a lucrative nightclub singing act. He drives around the city in a pink Cadillac. Meanwhile, seeking some small measure of publicity, a kitchen appliance salesman donates a brand new kitchen set to the mother of one of the victims. The mother is ecstatic. “Imagine me in that kitchen!” the mother tells her surviving daughter. All does not go as well for the drifter-turned crooner: he’s extradited to Florida on charges of having raped a 12-year-old there.

The question becomes, how can a writer of fiction make headway when each day’s news brings such lurid and fascinating stories? How can fiction compete with the real when the real can be so glammed up and game?

The Buffalo News recently ran a story about Brian “Spinner” Spencer, who played hockey with the Buffalo Sabres in the 1970s. Buffalo is my hometown, and I have fond memories of going with my father to the old Memorial Auditorium (“The Aud”) and watching Spencer and the Sabres. He was the kind of hockey player a blue-collar town loves: tough, aggressive, and persistent, there was no finesse to the way he wielded a stick. He never scored many goals, but he was always in the corners, fighting for the puck.

Off the ice, he custom-built a truck. Using the gutted chassis of a 2 ½ ton Army convoy transport as its base, he fitted onto it the cockpit of an old DC-3. He was friendly and generous, almost to a fault. Many of the truly great NHL players of the decade—Rick Martin, Darryl Sittler, Dave Keon, and Gerry Hart—maintained life-long friendships with him.

But flash back for a moment to 1970. Spencer has just been called up from the minor leagues to play in a nationally-televised NHL game. His father, Roy, lives in a remote British Columbia town.

“Roy Spencer was thrilled -- until he learned the local CBC affiliate wasn't going to show his son's game. It televised the Vancouver Canucks game instead. Roy Spencer drove 90 miles to the station in Prince George, took hostages at gunpoint and forced it off the air.

“When Roy Spencer emerged from the building, he shot at Mounties deployed outside. They returned fire, killing him in the parking lot.”

As soon as the game is over, officials deliver the bad news.

Can you imagine?

For the rest of his life, Spencer would tell anyone willing to listen that he was going to track down and kill the Mountie that shot his father.

Like Roth’s ne’er-do-well drifter, things did not end well for Spinner.

He retired from the game in 1980 and descended rapidly into substance abuse. He shot through what savings he had. Twice divorced and estranged from his children, he moved to Florida and shacked up with a professional escort. Former teammates tried to rescue him from his downward spiral, offering jobs and support, but he turned his back on them.

In 1987, he was arrested for kidnapping and murdering one of the escort’s johns. The prosecution builds its case largely on circumstantial evidence. The trial ends in an acquittal.

A few months after trial, Spencer’s life is still out-of-control. After bar-hopping all night with a friend, he makes a buy—crack cocaine. Shortly thereafter, he’s approached at gunpoint. It’s a stick-up, but Spencer refuses to co-operate. He’s shot and killed.

In a sidebar, The Buffalo News explored whether the material of Spencer’s life might make for a good movie. Reading this, I was aghast: Must the gold standard for a life be whether it can be successfully adopted for the big screen?

"That would be tricky," Mark Ciardi said of a film about Spencer's life. "I probably would have to keep stating "This is a true story!' over and over again to remind the audience.

"Nothing shocks me anymore, but [Spencer’s life] is a remarkable story. It's almost too crazy for the screen, too unbelievable."

The other day, I wrote about Willem de Kooning’s concept of “soup”—the role of the artist is to dip his or her hand into the “soup” that’s swirling all around us and make Art out of it. In the literary arts, the writer re-shapes and organizes events, creating meaning and impressions that hopefully will linger in the reader’s mind.

The single-best story I’ve read so far this year is the title piece to Ed Falco’s Burning Man (SMU Press), which was long-listed for this year’s prestigious Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

The story concerns a meeting at the Burning Man festival between a quiet academic/novelist and his brother, “a rock-and-roll bad boy known all over the world as Splay—guitar player, singer, public madman, and pervert from the band of the same name.”

Splay’s the kind of luridly fascinating character we read about almost every day in People, TMZ.com, and newspaper stories culled from the details of police blotter reports. As Philip Roth might have said, “Who could have invented him?”

Yet what makes Falco’s story hum is his mastery of metaphor and image. Too often, attention to image is given short shrift in writing workshops, but Falco’s images are superb. Not only will they give you the creeps (I honestly could not sleep the night after reading this story), but he employs them for a unifying effect, creating meaning through their assemblage and destruction.

I’m tempted to write a little about the specific images, but my children read this blog and, frankly, it’ll mess with their psychological well-being if I do.

So let me quote instead the story’s opening paragraph:

“Burning Man was heat, dust and madness, and I felt about as out of place as it’s possible to feel, in my middle-aged body, in my khaki shorts and knit shirt and sandals, in my expanding belly and soft chest and salt-and-pepper hair cut short, surrounded by the extraordinarily young and youthful with extravagant manes of vibrant hair and muscular, ripe bodies, either mostly undressed or wildly costumed in getups that ranged from Fellini to Mad Max. I’d been at the Labor Day weekend Festival of the Burning Man for two days. I was about to meet my brother, whom I hadn’t seen in more than ten years. I was with a young woman named Chrysalis, no last name, whom I’d met as soon as I arrived at the festival. I pulled up in my Volkswagen camper, parked, and got out to look around at the Black Rock Desert, which is an amazingly flat expanse of crackled mud, and she was standing there, a waif of a girl in fat metallic boots over silvery quilted space-suit pants that came up to her hips and left her hard stomach bare between their Velcro-tab top and the bottom of a bright yellow halter. A massive, framed backpack hovered over her shoulders like a small building. She struggled under the weight of it. I asked if I could be of any assistance, and she shook her head and said no, that she was just about to set up camp. I told her I hadn’t seen her when I pulled up, and I offered to find another spot, but she looked me over and then smiled and said, No, it’d be okay, and we went about setting up our encampments and thus became neighbors.”

Really, it’s masterful. As is the whole story. As the whole collection, which I read a few months ago when I was working on novel revisions. I’ve been meaning to blog about this book for ages, actually.

Many of the stories in the collection directly address what it means to be an artist. I first read “Wild Girls” a few years back when it appeared in The Missouri Review. In that story, two women pick up an artist/teacher for a ménage à trois. (Mind you: I’m typing this as my six-year-old daughter is interrupting me to show me her toy poodle.) One of the women is a former student of the artist.

“He told her, honestly, she had all the talent she needed to succeed as an artist. What he didn’t tell her was how incredibly unlikely it was she’d have the luck and resolve she’d also need, along with the even more unlikely chance she’d have the kind of vision as an artist that was of interest to anyone other than herself. Or that she’d have the kind of character and intelligence that could translate the chaos of experience into something meaningful and resonant, or, even better and more rare, something beautiful. Those were the miracles she’d need. Talent was plentiful.”

Yep. Those words have also kept me awake some nights.

As Lou Reed sang in quite a different context, “It takes a busload of faith to get by.”

The word choice is troubling, for it suggests that he now views fiction as some kind of scam or, at best, a frivolity that diverts intellectual attention from worthier endeavors. I dearly wish Roth’s interviewer, Jan Dalley, the Arts Editor of The Financial Times, would have drawn him out more on this. Although it appears that Roth still believes in writing fiction, he apparently no longer believes in reading it.

Regardless what one thinks of Roth—and I’m well aware that many judge him intolerable—the fact that a novelist of his stature would imply that fiction is no longer worth reading should give everyone pause.

To me, what Roth said is incomprehensible.

More than most contemporary writers, Roth’s work overtly converses with Literature, both challenging and paying homage to the very concept of fiction.

Consider, for example, some of the novels he’s published within the last five years:

Everyman, which won the Pen/Faulkner Award in 2007, is a modern update on the medieval morality play of the same name.

Exit Ghost (titled after a Shakespearean stage direction) riffs on Joseph Conrad’s 1916 novella, The Shadow-Line, and Roth’s own The Ghost Writer (in which the legacy of Anne Frank and her diary play a crucial role).

In Indignation, his 2008 novel depicting American life during the Korean War, the central character rebels after reading a Bertrand Russell essay. The novel itself is mostly set in Winesburg, Ohio—in homage Sherwood Anderson’s story collection.

Even in the minutia of Roth’s sentences, one finds references to other literary works.

Here is Roth describing the mounting Korean War causalities from the vantage of a football-obsessed American college student:

“Four thousand young men like yourselves, dead, maimed, and wounded, between the time we beat Bowling Green and the time we upset UWV.” (Indignation, p. 218)

Now check out Tadeusz Borowski, who describes the mounting executions in a Nazi concentration camp from the vantage of a soccer-obsessed prison guard:

“Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death.” (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, p. 84)

[Roth edited Borowski’s This Way for the Gas… while overseeing Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series in the 1970s & 80s. Through that Penguin series, Roth helped introduce American readers to a number of important East European writers, including Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kis, and Witold Gombrowicz].

The literary allusions do not necessarily mean these are great novels (reviewers, after all, have not been abundantly kind in their appraisal of them), but it is fair to say that the allusions indicate that Roth conceptualizes his creations through the lens of literary references. That’s why it surprises me that he no longer wishes to avail himself to reading fiction—it’s almost as if he’s exiling himself from the stream that has nourished his creative mind for the past five decades.

Elsewhere, it’s been implied that dwindling mental alertness is responsible for Roth’s inability to read fiction nowadays, but that strikes me as a wildly inappropriate conjecture—and one seemingly at odds with the otherwise alert and thoughtful man that Roth is portrayed as being in Dalley’s interview. No doubt others will read into Roth’s words a note of regret for the years he has devoted toward reading and writing fiction, but evidence of that regret is also absent in Dalley’s article.

"I don't think there's a decline of the novel so much as the decline of the readership," Roth said, mounting what he admitted was a favorite hobbyhorse. "There's been a drastic decline, even a disappearance, of a serious readership. That's inescapable.”

In that same interview, Roth conjectured that only 120,000 serious readers remained in this country.

I have no idea how accurate Roth’s guess might have been, or whether Roth ever updated that count. However, it now appears that we have one less serious reader of fiction than we used to have. For all of our sake, I hope it is only a temporary loss.